It is only a week since the unprecedented Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage, but the group is already making plans to combat confusion should this happen again in the future. The outage took all of these apps down for about six hours. In order to inform users of any future outages, Instagram has started testing notifications that will alert users to “temporary issues” like outages or other technical issues.
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According to Instagram’s blog post, the new alerts will appear in the user’s Activity Feed, right next to other in-app notifications. It will be able to notify the user of a wide variety of issues. For example, it can notify users of massive outages like last week, or something more simplistic like a Story not being able to upload. Instagram says it doesn’t plan to alert users to every issue, but ones that may be a source of widespread confusion.
“We won’t send a notification every single time there is an outage, but when we see that people are confused and looking for answers, we’ll determine if something like this could help make things clearer,” Instagram wrote. The company added that it’s testing the feature in the US “for the next few months.”
Furthermore, the company also showed a new “account status” section of its app, which is meant to alert users to “what’s going on with your account” more generally. Rule violations will also be highlighted to users more clearly, so they can see when an account “is at risk of being disabled,” for example.
All of these new features are meant to make the platform simpler and easier to understand for users. But more importantly, it is to help users understand if they have violated the company’s policies and improve transparency.
